JLeRN Reporting: Recommendations for Future Learning Registry Work in the UK

This is one of a series of posts from the JLeRN Experiment, forming sections of what will be our Final Report. Please send feedback and discussion in the comments section, as your own blog post response, via Twitter (hashtags #jlern #learningreg) or on the OER-Discuss and Learning Registry email lists. To see all the posts, click here

JLeRN Draft Report: 5. Recommendations

Current context: JISC

When these recommendations were originally drafted in June 2012, with the help of JISC CETIS and Amber Thomas, we were just at the start of a period of flux within our funding body JISC. We are well into the changes now, so we share these recommendations in the knowledge that we do not yet fully know the future shape of the new JISC and its community, nor how it will make funding decisions, nor what its priorities will be. Nevertheless, we put these ideas out there for discussion and posterity. The final version will take into account community feedback, so please fire away!

Current context: The Learning Registry

Equally, the future of the Learning Registry itself in the U.S. past October 2012 is unclear; it is likely that it will continue in some form, perhaps with a different funding structure. Moreover, much of the interest and exploratory work that has emerged in the U.S. is in the schools sector, around curriculum-related paradata.

JLeRN’s final days

JLeRN will finish at the end of October 2012, alongside the end of the JISC OER Rapid Innovation projects who are working with the Learning Registry. Several small-scale tasks will be carried out by keen contributors to JLeRN by the end of October (including taking part in a small end-of-JLeRN Workshop at Mimas on 22 October 2012):

• ENGrich project case study from the University of Liverpool.
• Pat Lockley’s four Pgogy tools for easy exploration of the Learning Registry.
• Terry McAndrew from JISC TechDIS will provide an accessibility paradata use case.
• David Kay of Sero Consulting will provide a Broader Context Report.
• The RIDLR project will report to the JLeRN Final Workshop on its findings.

All of these outputs, plus the final version of the report these JLeRN Reporting blog posts will feed into, will be made available here on the JLeRN blog.

Recommendations

As noted in the Skills and Capacity section of this report:

“[…] if we are to close the gap between the strategic enthusiasm for the potential wins of the Learning Registry, and the small-scale use case and prototype testing phase we are in, we will need a big push backed by a clear understanding that we will be walking into some of the same minefields we’ve trodden in, cyclically, for the past however many decades. And it is by no means clear yet that the will is there, in the community or at the strategic level.”

The recommendations below are still just putting the pieces together for a unified vision around sharing and using paradata in education; we are not yet ready, technically, or as a community of Learning Registry followers, to support that “big push”.

5.1 Recommendation: Synthesis of JLeRN, OER Rapid Innovation and related UK findings on Learning Registry.

This should include input from Liverpool University and others who have expressed an interest by attending Learning Registry / JLeRN meetings and workshops to date, perhaps carried out via a survey and/or other formal methods. Current developments within the U.S. Learning Registry project should be noted. There was also a whisper at one point that there was interest at the BBC, which would be worth looking into.

5.2 Recommendation: Explore benefits of the Learning Registry for UK sectors with well-defined curricula, e.g. schools, work-based learning and FE/Skills.

Educational sectors where there is a well-defined curriculum have been closely involved in the U.S. Learning Registry project. One UK HE project with a strong commitment to exploring the Learning Registry to date has been RIDLR, which is looking at the affordances for sharing paradata within and around a well-specified and mandated medical curriculum. It is therefore likely that there will be interest in the Learning Registry in sectors outwith UK HE that work with defined curricula.

5.3 Recommendation: Building on the experience of JLeRN and the current UK task group

There are likely to be ongoing explorations that projects, institutions, services (e.g. Jorum) and interested individuals (e.g. Pat Lockley) would like to do. Funding small well-specified projects to work on these tasks would be useful. Deciding whether JLeRN as a project providing a node or nodes, and expertise, will still be needed to support these (as opposed to them using U.S. Learning Registry nodes) would be a necessary part of planning this.

5.4 Recommendation: Explore mutual affordances with Activity Data work and other JISC Programmes

Those interested in activity streams, activity data, library circulation data, research data management, linked data, Semantic Web, and so on have noted an interest in JLeRN and the Learning Registry, and JLeRN lead Sarah Currier has kept in touch at a high level with key developments. JLeRN has commissioned a brief on the Learning Registry in a broader context than educational technology, which could support future thinking in this area. It may be worth exploring more in-depth tasks or projects to tease this area out.

JLeRN Reporting: Skills and Capacity in the UK for the Learning Registry

This is one of a series of posts from the JLeRN Experiment, forming sections of what will be our Final Report. Please send feedback and discussion in the comments section, as your own blog post response, via Twitter (hashtags #jlern #learningreg) or on the OER-Discuss and Learning Registry email lists. To see all the posts, click here.

JLeRN Draft Report: 3. Skills and Capacity in the UK

Who has skills and expertise?

As far as we can tell, only a small number of JISC and JISC CETIS staff, the JLeRN team, and those few dozen who have attended Learning Registry or JLeRN events are familiar with the Learning Registry concepts and use cases. See the previous report section on Appetite and Demand to get a feel for who has been following and participating in this work. Obviously there are probably other lurkers out there whom we haven’t met (yet)- feel free to make yourselves known in the blog comments!

Direct technical experience with the Learning Registry in the UK HE sector consists of (and please let me know if I’ve missed anyone!):

• JLeRN developer Nick Syrotiuk;
• The ENGrich team at Liverpool University, and their local technical staff who have worked with them setting up a Learning Registry node;
• Julian Tenney and his colleagues who work on Xerte at Nottingham University, who took an early interest in the Learning Registry when it started;
• Pat Lockley, formerly of Oxford University, now maintaining an interest in his own time outwith his current post; see his blog post for JLeRN describing and giving access to four Learning Registry tools he has developed.
• Those working on the JISC OER Rapid Innovation projects SPAWS (see blog posts here), RIDLR (see blog here) and Xerte/Xenith (see blog posts here) teams.

We have unfortunately lost the expertise of one key JISC CETIS expert: John Robertson; and two key developers: JLeRN’s Bharti Gupta, and Jorum’s Steven Cook (who worked on developing a CakePHP Datasource for Jorum to use with the Learning Registry). All of these people had become skilled in various aspects of the Learning Registry and all have now moved outwith JISC’s community.

Where the gaps are

As the afore-mentioned Appetite and Demand blog post notes, we’ve had enough interest and use cases coming in to make us feel the involvement we’ve had at Mimas has been worthwhile. Feedback from the institutions and projects working with or dipping their toe into JLeRN and the Learning Registry has mostly consisted of requests for easier entry to and navigation of the existing Learning Registry documentation, and simple Web apps and APIs to enable exploring, publishing to, searching and extracting from a Learning Registry node, as well as tools for capturing and collating paradata.

JLeRN has done a little to move forward with tools: we have the JLeRN Node Explorer by Nick Syrotiuk; Pat Lockley’s tools which we have facilitated access to through presentations slots and this blog; and we’ve tested using an OAI-PMH utility, developed in the U.S., to extract Jorum metadata and publish it to a node with its keywords converted into Learning Registry tags. We have kept our own node up-to-date in terms of software releases, and experimented with installing nodes on Ubuntu and Windows. We never found capacity to try out a cloud-hosted node – our American colleagues use Amazon Web Services, but we could never get to the bottom of how to manage costs within a UK university funding environment. Nor was there much call for experimenting with the more complex architectural proposals of the Learning Registry, namely, linking nodes in networks and communities.

What would be needed for the Learning Registry to move to the next level in the UK?

As the previous Appetite and Demand section noted:

“[…] those who recognise the gaps in paradata provision are interested in the Learning Registry at a strategic level, but this invariably raises an accompanying problem of expectations management. In describing the problem area the Learning Registry is aimed at, and the innovative approach being taken, it can be easy to latch onto this work as the next big thing that will solve all problems, without recognising that there is (a) a lot of work to be done, and (b) that work would require a well-supported infrastructure, both technically and in terms of communities, shared vocabularies, and so on.”

The JLeRN team have found that working with the Learning Registry code and specifications has been, to date, relatively straightforward. There is an initial steep learning curve in becoming familiar with the documentation and concepts, but the CouchDB-based software itself is easy to install and manage. As Pat Lockley has said, it is “state of the art”.

However, an example of an obvious weak spot is the limited vocabulary of the Learning Registry Paradata Specification, which throws into sharp relief the idea that any scalable implementation of the Learning Registry as an architecture will bring about some very familiar requirements: communities will need to agree on such issues as vocabularies, degrees of openness, licensing, shared content standards, and so on. That the Learning Registry as a technical investigation has chosen to push these concerns back out to the community, thus avoiding more years of technical discussion and testing around interoperability, does not mean that these concerns have evaporated. Moreover, JLeRN has asked David Kay of Sero Consulting to prepare a brief on where the Learning Registry sits in the broader context of the Web, linked data, research data management, activity data and libraries. There may be parallel development going on and we need to keep an eye on that.

What it does mean is that, if we are to close the gap between the strategic enthusiasm for the potential wins of the Learning Registry, and the small-scale use case and prototype testing phase we are in, we will need a big push backed by a clear understanding that we will be walking into some of the same minefields we’ve trodden in, cyclically, for the past however many decades. And it is by no means clear yet that the will is there, in the community or at the strategic level.

JLeRN Reporting: Appetite and Demand for the Learning Registry

This is one of a series of posts from the JLeRN Experiment, forming sections of what will be our Final Report. Please send feedback and discussion in the comments section, as your own blog post response, via Twitter (hashtags #jlern #learningreg) or on the OER-Discuss and Learning Registry email lists. To see all the posts, click here.

JLeRN Draft Report: 2. Appetite and Demand

Interest in the Learning Registry in the UK: a summary

Following on from the Hackday in January 2012, where considerable interest was shown in JLeRN, there were well-attended sessions at the CETIS Conference 2012 and OCWC/OER12. However, conference sessions and a Developer Challenge at developer-specific events Dev8D and Dev8eD were less well-attended, despite effort put into publicising JLeRN and encouraging participation. Those events were for developers working on the ground rather than project managers or strategic thinkers; it seems the immediate benefit of the Learning Registry to coders wanting to code cool stuff was not yet apparent, although if you are interested in some exceptions to that, see our blog post about Pat Lockley’s plugins here and our own JLeRN Node Explorer here.

Building on this early buzz, a small number of institutions have shown an interest in trialling implementation of the Learning Registry around well-defined use cases meeting real community needs, although only one has followed through: Liverpool University have implemented their own node to support their ENGrich work (a JLeRN Case Study is coming on this). There have also been projects hoping to try out the Learning Registry approach as a side issue to their core work (e.g. Xenith, ORBIT- see below), recognising the potential value and wanting to take advantage of JLeRN while it was available to help. However, lack of capacity on both sides prevented much happening beyond discussion.

Learning Registry: popular with JISC OER projects

Six projects working with the Learning Registry were funded in the JISC OER Rapid Innovation Programme, and one FE-based project involved JLeRN in its bid, but was not funded. Two JISC OER Programme projects (ENGrich at Liverpool University and ORBIT at Cambridge University) have also initiated collaboration with JLeRN; we have supported ENGrich with their node and commissioned a case study, whereas with ORBIT we only managed some initial discussions on the idea of sharing semantic data using the Learning Registry, an idea we would’ve loved to explore further.

Are others interested in the Learning Registry, sans funding?

Where people have secured funding (or institutional support in the case of ENGrich) directly related to the Learning Registry, they have been able to collaborate with JLeRN. It is important to note that these projects, while they relate to very real use cases, are small scale and exploratory, like JLeRN itself. In no case are they close to developing anything like a strategic or service level implementation. This is as it should be, however, given the stage the Learning Registry itself is at.

Others who showed an early interest, for instance, The Open University’s LabSpace and LearningSpace platforms; JISC TechDIS; and the Health, E-Learning and Media (HELM) team at Nottingham University (distinct from the Xerte / Xenith team at Nottingham who have an OER Rapid Innovation project), have not been able to make resource available to work with JLeRN as it is too experimental and not part of their core work. Their participation in our events and discussions has been valuable and much appreciated, however. And Terry McAndrew at TechDIS is working up an accessibility use case which will be published here on the blog.

Interest in the Learning Registry outwith the educational technology sector

There are other JISC communities outwith educational technology that have shown an interest in JLeRN and the Learning Registry, the most prominent being those involved in content, discovery and activity data. Joy Palmer, a Senior Manager at Mimas with a number of interests and projects in these areas, has been keeping her own watching brief on the progress of JLeRN. Joy and Amber Thomas made sure that JLeRN was represented at JISC Content and Discovery Cross-Programmes Meeting in April 2012, where a number of useful conversations were had. Amber Thomas has also noted that the research data management community has similar issues to solve. JLeRN has commissioned a report looking at how the Learning Registry might benefit these wider areas: see David Kay’s JLeRN blog post initiating discussion around this. His final report will also be published here on the blog.

Strategic interest and expectations management

Broadly speaking, discussions within the HE community in the UK and abroad, as reported informally by various JLeRN, Mimas, CETIS and JISC folk, have indicated that those who recognise the gaps in paradata provision are interested in the Learning Registry at a strategic level, but this invariably raises an accompanying problem of expectations management. In describing the problem area the Learning Registry is aimed at, and the innovative approach being taken, it can be easy to latch onto this work as the next big thing that will solve all problems, without recognising that there is (a) a lot of work to be done, and (b) that work would require a well-supported infrastructure, both technically and in terms of communities, shared vocabularies, and so on.

How widely useful is the Learning Registry?

Mimas has been working with a variety of UK collaborators on the JISC-funded JLeRN Experiment, an exploration of the Learning Registry (LR) as an application, as an architecture and as a software toolset. There have been a number of valuable developments, including LR nodes, and a range of use cases has been identified and some tested in areas relating to learning resource discovery, utilization and associated paradata.

The JLeRN project completes at the end of October 2012 and Mimas is authoring a Final Report looking at appetite, demand and sectoral capacity with some use cases and case studies.

To supplement this core work, I’ve been asked to produce a complementary report examining the wider potential affordances of The Learning Registry as an architecture or conceptual approach, looking beyond the core educational technology focus to the broader information environment and the associated JISC community.

This will be a short report – but there will be plenty of room to highlight suggestions and observations. So you may wish to comment here on any of my THREE questions – or to add another! Throughout, bear in mind that we’re interested in the potential of the LR and its reuse as an approach to a problem space, as an application, as an architecture or simply as a bunch of reusable Open Source software.

ONE – What functions should the LR provide to be useful? For example …

• Storage, indexing and retrieval at scale
• Distributed / federated data store management
• Authentication, authorisation and other security features
• Provision of open APIs / service interfaces for ingest, publishing and discovery
• Range of ingest / submission / output data formats
• Reporting and visualisation
• Support for annotation, rating and other user contributions

TWO – In what applications or domains could the LR be useful? For example …

• Library activity data
• Research data
• Repository
• Profiles of people, places
• General analytics data
• Heterogeneous / specialised metadata

THREE – Are there alternative/complementary approaches to the same requirement/problem space? For example …

• Repositories such as DSpace, Fedora, etc
• California Digital Library Micro-services
• Apache Jackrabbit based document stores
• Enterprise data warehouse applications
• Other approaches using combinations of NoSQL databases and indexing

Any comments via this blog will assist in shaping a presentation of iideas at the JLeRN project closing event on 22 October and my public report due by 31 October. Regardless of whether you wish to comment, thanks for your interest!

PS – My report and anything else coming out of this will be published under a Creative Commons CC0 licence.

The Learning Registry and JLeRN at the CETIS Conference: Report and Reflections

In late February, the JLeRN team, along with Steven Cook who is working with us from the Jorum team, attended the annual CETIS Conference, and participated in the Learning Registry: Capturing Conversations About Learning Resources session. See this previous post for our presentation slides.

Our intention was that the CETIS Conference would be a significant point of reflection for the project: a chance to evaluate what JLeRN has achieved so far in light of community discussion and feedback, and a chance to get some pointers on how we should spend the next five months, since we finish at the end of July.

This week I’ll be meeting with Amber Thomas, our JISC Programme Manager, to write up an interim report for JISC, so I’m hoping this post will help me start to crystalise what I think personally, and what I’m hearing from the community. Skip right to the bottom of this post to see some bullet-pointed suggestions for further work from participants!

Firstly, can I just give a big shout out to Phil and Lorna from CETIS, and also to John who has now left CETIS but who helped a lot with organising the session. It was great!  Phil was particularly heroic in filling in for Dan Rehak by interpreting his slides for us. Also thanks to Walt Grata from the US Learning Registry team who came all the way to Nottingham just to hang out with all of us for a couple of days: it was absolutely invaluable having him there in person to advise, inform and have a laugh with.

Stepping Back: An Overview

As previously mentioned, Phil started us off with an overview of the Learning Registry. He presented some slides developed by Dan Rehak, which included diagrams peering into the Learning Registry model and concepts from a number of different angles. I’m getting the hang of it now, but I don’t doubt there were some baffled faces in the room at this point (I was at the front, and I didn’t look around). I keep reassuring people that you need to go through this stuff a few times using a few different resources to get a grip on it. However, speaking for myself, it was really useful to step back out of JLeRN and be reminded of how the Learning Registry is conceptualised by its creators.

The best thing for me about Dan/Phil’s presentation was being reminded of the Big Use Case. In the US, massive amounts of federal money is spent on educational resources which are then held in numerous silos, e.g. Nasa, PBS, NSDL, the Department of Defence may all hold different versions of the same resource. And therefore paradata, or usage data, about those resources may also be split into these different silos. Each portal only knows about a subset of what’s happening around their resources. How to pull it all together? The Learning Registry hopes to be a solution. This is highly relevant to Jorum here in the UK, which already shares resources with other services like Ireland’s National Digital Learning Repository.

We were in imminent danger of getting dragged into discussing definitions of paradata versus other kinds of data and metadata but Amber pulled us back from the brink, reminding us that we are not in the business of classifying types of data around resources: the nice thing about the Learning Registry is that it’s all in scope. Walt agreed, noting that “As long as you can express it as a string, and in JSON” it’s in scope. Walt also pointed out that even though there is a paradata specification available in the Learning Registry documentation, it’s not something that is required or validated; it’s just one suggestion to get folk going. “You can make up whatever you want”, he said.

Some Participants Chime In

This discussion led to Fred Riley from the SONET repository at Nottingham University, and Terry McAndrew from TechDIS asking some questions about how they could get involved. Fred would like to publish his repository’s OERs into the JLeRN node. There will be more on this in a later blog post, but the basic upshot is that this bespoke repository coded by Fred himself offers an RSS feed but not OAI-PMH, and until this point we’d been talking about publishing repository OAI-PMH feeds into our node. This was a timely discussion as Pat Lockley had just been working on a way to publish RSS into the Learning Registry, so it was a bit of edtech speed dating there.

Terry reiterated some of his ideas from the Hackday in January, following up with questions about how teachers can pull together stuff they have in a range of places (e.g. WordPress, Delicious, Posterous) to publish to the Learning Registry. All of this prompted some reminders about what an early stage proof-of-concept technical infrastructure project the Learning Registry is: some tools for developers and others are starting to emerge, but at this point just listening to these kinds of requests is all we can do. Walt noted that in the US there is work going on developing a few plug-ins and apps to work with various things teachers use to publish their content. Pat Lockley here in the UK also has some stuff on the go.

Terry also asked at a later point whether we can harvest from JISCmail as a source of data: folk can then see contributions that they’ve already made being used. Amber (from JISC) agreed strongly but noted that there are currently limitations- Brian Kelly has advised JISCmail to make their data harvestable.

Lorna on JISC / CETIS Interest in the Learning Registry

Why are JISC and CETIS interested in the Learning Registry? Folk are asking all the time whether they should get involved: is now the right time? Lorna noted again that this is an ongoing project; it’s being built right now. We don’t know how successful it will be. From CETIS’s point of view, it appears to be an interesting development that’s addressing problem we’ve had for ages.

Just for context, Lorna showed us a new OER timeline resource being developed by Lou McGill, which gives a graphical representation of the history of learning resources within JISC and CETIS. She noted that they used to recommend open standards for educational content, but that they were tricky to implement. Metadata for learning resources has been particularly problematic: describing educational context is very difficult. With the advent of the JISC OER Programmes, they decided to ask for descirptions of a few key aspects of resources, but not in standardised way.

The key questions that are still hard to answer are: How do we know where resources have gone, how they’ve been used, have they been remixed etc. So JISC and CETIS are interested in Learning Registry, because it acknowledges that we can’t normalise the mess of data. We need to get it into a network, and let clever people build services and tools to query the data. CETIS like that it’s dealing with the reality of the way the world is.

Amber on the Wider JISC Context

JISC supports the sharing of learning materials and digital library materials. Amber noted two other JISC Programmes that have looked at this stuff: the Activity Data and Discovery programmes. They are interested in open metadata; encouraging the flow of data. If you have data more openly available, makes resources more visible, this is a virtuous circle making discovery easier.

Andy Powell (who wasn’t present) Tweeted a question asking if we are talking about #bigdata at the Conference. This is about identifying patterns in data; it resonates with the Learning Registry model of the benefits of opening up data. The Managing Research Data programme has similar issues.

There is a question around how much effort are people willing to put into describing, rather than having that data inferred/extracted/derived. Amber name-checked Zoe Rose from the BBC on whether we should even try to describe educational resources, or at least the educational aspects of educational resources: Zoe thinks not, it just gets sketchy.

So, Amber reiterated again: JLeRN is not a pilot, it’s an experiment. Mimas run a node to be point of reference; JISC are not planning to necessarily turn it into a service. The questions starting to arise for her with her JISC hat on are: What are skills issues involved? What sorts of developers can start to learn these skills? It’s a capacity issue, and an appetite issue. Who are the people who want to make apps and widgets? What are their skillsets? JLeRN won’t be sustainable unless people get involved.

JLeRN’s Presentations

I refer you back to our slides and handout here. I like to think we’ve made a bit of a contribution to the resources helping folk understand what the Learning Registry is doing with these, so please do have a look.

Some Projects and Ideas

The next session was presentations on some work folk are doing or hoping to do around the Learning Registry and/or JLeRN. Hope to get some slides and links in here later.

Scott Wilson (Bolton University / JISC CETIS) on SPAWS: Sharing Paradata Across Widget Stores

– There are 3 educational widget stores sharing paradata (reviews, ratings, downloads) using the Learning Registry. The reason why 3 stores have been developed is because they are for different audiences, have different policies etc.
– The same widget in different stores would have paradata in different places. So they want to use the Learning Registry to bring together this paradata.
– Paradata includes downloads, ratings, embeds, reviews. It’s the same structure of information across different stores, so there are no ontology arguments. They are working on a shared architecture.
– Noted: there is a problem with how paradata is managed in Learning Registry. Their question is how to normalise paradata because the Learning Registry isn’t doing normalisation.
– They put in a bid to JISC OER Rapid Innovation for SPAWS.

Discussion:

Terry McAndrew mentioned that we need to identify good reviews of content rather than quick comments. There may be an opportunity for text mining in the middle, to bring out something more useful than Wordles. It worries him that there’s loads of info about resources: but it doesn’t include specifically meaningful stuff.

Scott responded with an example review: “I tried this in IE6 it doesn’t work”, noting that getting any comment is such a struggle, he’ll be happy with anything. If other organisations are interested in more in-depth stuff that’s fine, SPAWS just want enough to make it useful.

Owen Stephens noted that there are also stats about bias in reviews; that you could get many more bad reviews than good, but Scott felt that there is enough context around reviews for folk to interpret them. People don’t just say “oh 2 stars, it’s crap”.. you can leave some nuance to the reader.

Martin Hawksey said that as soon as he publishes anything, he gives himself 5 stars; so the system is open to gaming. Scott responded that if someone games it as positive and you use it and it’s rubbish, you are more likely to review it yourself; it balances itself out.

Phil Barker asked if there would be information on who is providing reviews; Scott noted that this will depend on the policies of the widget stores, whether they ask folk for permission to share their reviews; there may be some tracing of user activity. Some stores have to have control over user experience.

Amber noted that these issues of using paradata are fairly new and require some teasing out. It’s a different sort of architecture: it’s more distributed; it’s different from building a big website with the functionality inside it. We are separating it out; people don’t know how their reviews might be used. It’s still difficult to get our heads round it. People will need to re-calibrate how things are tweaked and used.

Terry McAndrew (TechDis): Learning Registry – Opportunities for Accessibility?

Terry shared some ideas at the Hackday in January about possibly using the Learning Registry to capture accessibility data about resources; perhaps simple reviews by people stating how well a given resource met their accessibility requirements as a start. This time, rather than showing a tool or app, or even a use case, Terry presented a “problem environment”: to enable participants understand what accessibility requirements might be.

– TechDis gives Inclusion Technology Advice across very broad range of education, including offender learning, so there are a broader range of issues and constraints than JISC projects even normally look at. The focus is on issues easily overlooked – accessibility.
– TechDis want conversations between developers, tutors and users about resources to be laterally available- live dialogue rather than end of year review, and available to all, to boost accessible development, and to expose issues around resource and practice early (including good and bad accessibility factors).
– Quality of data is extremely important.
– Terry asked whether we could get Learning Registry output through Google; noted the Xerte philosophy- doesn’t look glossy but gets lots of data through.
– Terry also noted that efforts around visualising OER use needs all the stakeholders’ invovlement. We need graphics that illustrate different types of users in different environments to see how the traffic is moving.

Discussion

Amber noted the validity of this view being wider: there’s accessibility, there’s usability, there’s mobile. Are there underlying characteristics that can go together? So not about boxing accessibility into one thing? Usability and mobile need similar things as a lot of accessibility.

Terry responded that this is where a controlled vocab would help, but Amber noted that questions of control and vocabulary happen before the data goes into the Learning Registry. The Learning Registry can then get the mass of developers around it to work on it.

Walt Grata from the Learning Registry: Harvesting Tool and Landing Pages

Walt talked about two things he has been working on for the Learning Registry to help developers: a harvesting tool and landing pages.

Harvesting Tool:

This tool can be used to harvest from any Learning Registry node that you want, and cache the data locally for analysis, mashing up, etc. Point the tool at a node’s HTTP endpoint, do a bit of config; it does a periodic harvest. You can get it all out in whatever format you want. He’s working on validation- and he noted that anyone who wants to try it out can raise an issue on GitHub and he will get to it. This work came about because he found he was writing bits of code for developers to use in Java, CSharp, JavaScript, etc., so he wanted to make all this available to just be plucked from GitHub.

Landing Pages:

Walt wanted to make available simple landing pages for resources, including backlinks for SEO, that are indexable by Google, so folk can find Learning Registry stuff through Google.

Discussion
There was some discussion around the relationship between the Learning Registry work and Google, touching on whether we are trying to create a parallel universe to Google, whether Google was interested in what the Learning Registry was doing, and to what extent the schema.org Learning Resource Metadata Initiative work might help (see Phil Barker at CETIS for more on that; Phil also noted that schema.org are coming out with other potentially useful vocabularies, e.g. to do with ratings). Lorna shared the interesting background that Google may have had a role in encouraging the Learning Registry project at the highest levels of the US administration: they were concerned about not being able to get to the swathes of educational content in silos.

There is also the question of how to identify unique resources in the Learning Registry given some resources will be available in different silos at different URLs. At the moment resources are only identifiable by having the same URL; Walt noted that they are currently looking at using RDF triples with “sameAs”.

Pat Lockley: Services Built Around the Learning Registry

See Pat’s slides here. Pat talked about two services he’s been working on:

– A Chrome extension for Google searches returning Learning Registry hits, that will display attributes about the resource in your search results. This could be what CC licence is applied to the resources, but as the Learning Registry develops, it could also include paradata, or data from the resource’s activity stream.

– A WordPress plugin that will let you display Learning Registry node content (accessed via “slice”, which is the Learning Registry search function) in your WordPress blog (I know, let’s try that in this blog! Watch this space).

Steven Cook from Jorum: Getting Paradata Out of Jorum and into the JLeRN Node

We’ve published all of Jorum’s metadata into the JLeRN node (that’s >15,000 resources), but we’ve also been looking at how to get paradata, initially just as some simple statistics and usage data, out of Jorum into the node. Steven Cook’s been exploring this as he is Jorum’s resident expert in extracting statistics.

Steven has been working on creating a CakePHP DataSource (“DataSources are the link between models and the source of data that models represent”) for the Learning Registry API, because CakePHP is being used to build the Jorum statistics Dashboard, and because CakePHP is designed for rapid development, is ideal for prototyping Web applications.

The Learning Registry DataSource abstracts away the connection requirements and the intricacies of the API and helps connect Cake developers directly to the Learning Registry, allowing them to simply “plug in” to a node and use the data obtained directly in their developments.

With the read capabilities of the DataSource he hopes to create a simple Web interface that will allow users to search the LR for resources. He also talked about “mashing up” this data with other sources across the internet including Topsy, Twitter, Names, Google, Klout. There are DataSources available for these other services and he has already written one for Topsy for the Jorum Dashboard.

Watch this space: Steven will be blogging on this soon here!

Discussion

When asked how scalable the CakePHP approach is, Steven responded that he probably won’t end up using Cake- but that it was a good way to gain understanding of how the Learning Registry works. He will probably port it to something else. He noted that the Learning Registry doesn’t give you exactly what you want and is not completely RESTful. In future he would cache on his side.

If You Could Have One Thing From or For the Learning Registry

We had a few minutes left at the end of the session, so I prevailed upon Lorna to ask everyone to say one thing they would like to see happen in the Learning Registry space. Here are the ideas shared, sans attribution! Contributors are welcome to expand on these, or add to them by commenting on this post!

• Simple software libraries for a range of languages to interact with LR.
• An OAI Explorer which allows you to poke at a node see what’s there.
• The ability to get learning resources out by a simple search- e.g. of activity stream; what’s trending.
• Would like to see my institution release Dynamic Learning Maps data for LR.
• Developer how-tos.
• How to deal with backdated paradata; website used for years, all that usage data- do I submit individual records for every single event? Don’t want to crush the node by submitting 50,000 uses.
• Hide the hard stuff.
• Can we get some good stuff from Google Scholar?
• Accessibility dialogue.
• How can we really make use of Google to get to LR content.

Finally, Lorna announced that JISC are running a DevEd event in Birmingham: a 2-day hackday focusing specifically on educational apps. Keep an eye out for further announcements, and put 29-30 May in your calendar!